2022 Clashes/ Recalls/ Celebrations

Abstract

2022 – what a year! 200 years of independence and 100 years of the week of modern art, the most important elections in decades, indeterminacy, uncertainty. In this tense year, full of unusual densities, I set out to think about these dates and celebrations based on a few questions: what and how do we celebrate. This question has to do with the place we occupy – all of us – within the Brazilian public university and in my case, the largest and most significant public university in São Paulo. It is also appropriate here, based on networks and contacts, dialogues with other universities, to mention that I learned to provincialize both my home state – São Paulo and my home university – USP. In any case, commemorating and remembering these milestones from new points of view and interlocutions seems to be closely related to a continuous reinvention of the past by the present, with a reinvention of the questions we ask of the past and their interpretations – both the canonical ones and those that fluctuate at the whim of each new question posed by a conjunction that is also unprecedented or seen and experienced as unprecedented.